Your Story

In a recent post I mentioned that in life we often get involved in other people's story lines and how ultimately those aren't our stories to tell, there's something about this idea that keeps lingering in my mind.  If you consider life as a whole to be one big never ending story that everyone is part of, like a soap opera with 7 billion actors playing their part, we only ever know our lines and the scenes we play a part in, as for the rest, most of the time we live in obliviousness.  I've said before about how when you are younger and you meet people for the first time, there's a desire to catch up on their life story and know everything you can about them, and how, with age this desire begins to wane.  You come to a point where there are only a handful of questions from their past you actually want to know the answer to before you start moving forward together.  If you consider life to be a TV show, that one big soap opera then this is akin to asking another actor what their character's motivation is, in order to understand how they might play their part and get a feel for their energy before you start acting out together.

Maybe one reason why biographies and autobiographies actually sell so well is because they fill in the gaps.  They let us see the life that other people lived, in a way this is like watching old episodes to get an idea of the story lines that repeat themselves.  If you take the time to watch any soap opera on TV for long enough, sooner or later you begin to see repetition.  You see the same script with a different cast, the same story retold, the same events happening but to different characters.  There's very little along the way that you can truly consider "new" or "fresh" perhaps this is why some people grow tired of them and move on.  Have you ever stopped and thought about the idea that soap operas although fictional actually tap into something incredibly real?  The reality that everyone lives the same life, with the same events happening to most people.  Some actors are lucky enough to miss out on scenes or unlucky as the case may be, so that their character never experiences something in particular.

I read a post online a long time ago, it was one of those sites like creepy pasta, where the story they wrote was about someone who died and when they got to the afterlife they were told that they would be sent back, reincarnated as another person, and then told that every single person alive on Earth both past and present was actually them, one soul, reliving life over and over, each time playing the part of another character.  The horrible realisation was that every single person no matter how much you loved or hated them was in fact you, yourself, at another point on your journey.  Your soul crisscrossed through space and time each time you died, being reborn as someone else, from the beginning until the end of time, and only then when you had lived every life there was to live would you be "ready" to move on.

Whilst I wouldn't take the idea to that extreme, there is a fascination in knowing other peoples' stories.  When you walk down the street and you pass hundreds, or thousands, or if you live in a metropolis maybe even millions of people, every single one has a life they have lived and a life yet to live.  The story each person could tell would fill a book.  Very few people in life actually write a book, those that manage to do it often end up writing more than one.  If every single person wrote their life story, what would that look like?  It's easy to look at social media and say that people share their lives through their profiles but I beg to differ.  525,600 minutes measures a year, if you were 30 years old, then that would approximate to 15.8 million tweets, one for every minute of your life.  If you're interested the limit would actually be 26.3 million for that time period.  If you could tweet once a minute for your whole life, would that even document your life?  I've written on here before about the disparity and the disconnect between online and offline personas and how accurate they are.  There is also a question of how much of your life you can actually live whilst tweeting about it at the same time, that's before you even consider the fact that many people have more than one profile on more than one social network.

You have a story to tell, the story of your life.  How interesting do you think it would be to others?  If you think nothing interesting ever happened to you, do you think that means nobody would want to read it?  If you answered yes, ask yourself if you think every tweet you ever read was interesting, or how many people have profiles filled with tweets you think are not, and ask yourself again if people might be interested in knowing your story.  Even if you think the life you've lived would be too mundane to write about, think of the life you would like to live, and ask yourself who would find that interesting instead?  Some of the greatest works of fiction were written by authors desperate to escape their reality by creating worlds filled with characters and hope they didn't have in their own life. 

Write for yourself first of all, write something you would want to read, and then share it with the world and see how the world reacts.  There are forums, there are websites, there are groups, there are profiles on social media, all dedicated to the craft filled with people who are eager to share, and remember one simple piece of advice, if you want to become a better writer, then read.